Usage of Predicates (adjectives vs. verbs) in Persons with Anomic and Broca’s Aphasia
-
1
Ewha Womans University, Republic of Korea
-
2
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, College of Public Health, Temple University, United States
Introduction. Many studies have focused on word retrieval deficits associated with nouns and verbs for people with aphasia (Matzig et al., 2009). Although it is still controversial how best to account for the underlying mechanisms associated with noun-verb retrieval in aphasia, substantial efforts have been made in the investigation of noun-verb deficits (Druks, 2002). However, adjectives have gained relatively less attention compared to verbs and nouns to examine word-retrieval deficits in aphasia. Meltzer-Asscher and Thompson (2014) analyzed adjectives by coding them either as predicative or attributive in agrammatic aphasia. They reported that agrammatic individuals produced more predicative than attributive adjectives compared to their controls. The current study examined the usage of predicates in individuals with Broca’s and anomic aphasia by analyzing the subtypes of predicates.
Methods. A total of 14 aphasic individuals participated in the study (7 for each type, Broca's and anomic aphasia). They were Korean native speakers diagnosed as aphasia with a left-hemisphere stroke based on the Korean version of Western Aphasia Battery (K-WAB) (Kim & Na, 2001). We used a ‘cat rescue’ picture (Nicholas & Brookshire, 1993) to obtain connected speech samples.
Predicates were coded as two categories of verbs and adjectives, which were further categorized as subtypes for each category (Table 1). Frequency of linguistic variables was normalized by the number of utterances.
Results. Mann-Whitney U tests revealed significant group differences in the total verbs and auxiliary be-verbs, indicating that the anomic group generated more verbs and auxiliary be-verbs than individuals with Broca’s aphasia. In the adjective analyses, the anomic group produced marginally more predicative adjectives than Broca’s aphasia, whereas group differences were not significant for attributive adjectives.
Discussion. The current study investigated whether there were significant differences in the usage of predicates between anomic and Broca’s aphasia by analyzing the predicates at microlinguistic levels. In general, the anomic group demonstrated greater numbers of total verbs especially with more auxiliary subtypes of verbs than the Broca’s aphasia group. Furthermore, the anomic group exhibited greater numbers of predicative adjectives, whereas the group differences were minimal for the attributive adjectives. These results indicate that the anomic group demonstrated a greater diversity in usage of predicates than did the Broca’s aphasia group, implying that it is clinically important to analyze the diversity of predicates, not just focusing on the quantitative differences in noun-verb dissociation to characterize the subtypes of aphasia.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Global Research Network program through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017S1A2A2038375).
References
Druks, J. (2002). Verbs and nouns—a review of the literature. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 15(3-5), 289-315.
Kim, H. H., & Na, D. L. (2001). Paradise· Korean version-Western aphasia battery (K-WAB). Seoul:Paradise welfare foundation.
Mätzig, S., Druks, J., Masterson, J., & Vigliocco, G. (2009). Noun and verb differences in picture naming: Past studies and new evidence. Cortex, 45(6), 738-758.
Meltzer-Asscher, A., & Thompson, C. K. (2014). The forgotten grammatical category: Adjective use in agrammatic aphasia. Journal of neurolinguistics, 30, 48-68.
Nicholas, L. E., & Brookshire, R. H. (1993). A system for quantifying the informativeness and efficiency of the connected speech of adults with aphasia. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 36(2), 338-350.
Keywords:
verbs,
adjectives,
Aphasia,
Anomic,
Broca,
Predicates
Conference:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting, Macau, Macao, SAR China, 27 Oct - 29 Oct, 2019.
Presentation Type:
Poster presentation
Topic:
Not eligible for student award
Citation:
Sung
J,
Lee
S,
Yoo
S,
Yoon
H,
Kim
S,
Shin
S,
Yoo
M and
DeDe
G
(2019). Usage of Predicates (adjectives vs. verbs) in Persons with Anomic and Broca’s Aphasia.
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2019.01.00058
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
06 May 2019;
Published Online:
09 Oct 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Mx. Jee Eun Sung, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Republic of Korea, jeesung@ewha.ac.kr